Falcon Pro (for Twitter) Is a Newshound's Best Friend

Falcon Pro is a fast Twitter client that is undoubtedly the best ever seen at Android -- not only in its functionality, but also in its scalability. I plan to install it on my Telechips SUNCHIPS CX-1 mini Android PC hooked up to a television and run my own always-on, ever updating Twitter feed in the corner of my office.

Falcon Pro (for Twitter) pitches itself as "the ultimate Twitter experience on Android," and while
one can usually take these app-store hyperbole laden statements with an idiom-laden
statement -- in this case a grain of salt -- there is one thing that I'm looking for in a Twitter
client that Falcon Pro promises.

It's something that I find hard to believe other clients haven't delivered -- and believe
me, I've tried many of them, including TweetCaster.

What I'm looking for -- the newshound that I am -- is functionality whereby Twitter's
tweet timeline automatically refreshes on the screen with a real-time, actual tweet,
rather than a hyperlinked notification that a certain number of new tweets are available.

The universally found hyperlinked notification that a certain number of new tweets are
available requires the further step of clicking the hyperlink to reveal the actual tweet text.

Server Load

There's a reason that the entire text isn't delivered without a manual request. It's to
do with server load -- but I can't believe it has taken until now for a Twitter client to
overcome the issue.

For this case, I hope that some of the $0.99 I gave Joaquim Vergès, the publisher of Falcon Pro (for
Twitter), is going to make its way back to Twitter's sparkly, yoga studio-dripping, mid-market San Francisco art deco headquarters to pay for the server load, and Twitter isn't going to abruptly disable my now continually refreshing news feed. Art deco costs money.

I have set the Falcon Pro client to refresh with the real-time, actual tweets at the
maximum rate of every two minutes, and I'm sure many others are setting the same
refresh rate. Works great.

For nostalgia buffs: I seem to remember that tweets used to refresh with text back in the
old days.

Testing the App

Further playing with Falcon Pro reveals a highly pleasant interface.

Scrolling feels remarkably fast and smooth, and notifications expand cleverly into an
internal mini browser -- a short press on the tweet itself opens a details pane. While
you're reading the abstract, any tweet-included hyperlink opens in the browser pane.

This is a neat solution for handling the extra time required for a graphically full, Web
page styled, hyperlinked page load.

Widgets and Versions

A widget is available for Android 3.0 and above; plus, there's a $1.99 Falcon Pro Donate
version with Falcon wallpapers and a quick tweet feature that lets you tweet from the
notification bar and supposedly reduces battery drain.

I didn't go for the $1.99 Donate version because I don't tweet that much -- I'm a lurker --
and I personally don't like the Falcon graphical identity prevalent in the wallpapers. It's
very dark -- almost gloomy.

But to each their own and De gustibus non est disputandum.

If Vergès creates a more airy, light-themed version -- a simple matter of reversing colors
with black to white and vice versa -- he may see a further donation from me, assuming
my real-time timeline hasn't been cutoff by Twitter by then.

In Conclusion

This is a fast Twitter client that is undoubtedly the best ever seen at Android -- not only in
its functionality, but also in its scalability. I plan to install it on my Telechips SUNCHIPS CX-1 mini Android PC hooked up to a television and run my own always-on, ever
updating Twitter feed in the corner of my office.

Patrick Nelson has been a professional writer since 1992. He was editor and publisher of the music industry trade publication Producer Report and has written for a number of technology blogs. Nelson studied design at Hornsey Art School and wrote the cult-classic novel Sprawlism. His introduction to technology was as a nomadic talent scout in the eighties, where regular scrabbling around under hotel room beds was necessary to connect modems with alligator clips to hotel telephone wiring to get a fax out. He tasted down and dirty technology, and never looked back.